Private profiles are now generally available on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Private profiles are now generally available on GitHub

github.blog

109 pointssoheilpro64 comments

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31115642 ("GitHub: Private Profiles beta", April 2022, 125 comments)

While looking over my GitHub account settings just now, I noticed that you can now designate a successor:

> By clicking "Add Successor" below, I acknowledge that I am the owner of the @ttmc account, and am authorizing GitHub to transfer content within that account to my GitHub Successor, designated below, in the event of my death. I understand that..."

https://github.com/settings/admin

This has been a thing for years and years.

About 2 years:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-05-11-account-successors/

@Dang, when will we be able to designate successors to our HN accounts?

In the future children will argue over who inherits their parent's Hacker News karma. To avoid legal complications be sure to specify in your will which favorite child inherits your Hacker News legacy.

Will there be an inheritance tax on HN karma?

It must lest HN ends up with a permanent upper class of exclusive commenters.

That's actually what happened at Slashdot. I scraped a slice of all postings a few years ago and there was a notable trend where early UIDs below 200K were posting the bulk of comments.

Absolutely. There should also be a wealth tax system that automatically reduces your karma by 1% every month, and distributes that amount equally to other commenters.

It's important to note the difference between our online personas, such as HN accounts, and our online self-appointed responsibilities, such as our Github accounts.

I understand the reasoning for a clear path of succession of the latter. I do not believe that the former should carry on after our deaths. Our personas should die with us.

There should be at least the possibility of making a post announcing the death and a build a virtual memorial

Personally, I found gitlab has been quite nice for many years now and I've had free private profiles there since I signed up. It's a great service

The same. I love gitlab ci/cd.

It is great but last I used it there wasn’t any kind of free tool like dependabot built in.

https://gitlab.com/dependabot-gitlab/dependabot

Haven't tried it yet, though.

Renovate is more complete and fully open source.

https://renovatebot.com/

But you will need to self host it, the included dependency checks in GitLab are paid.

However renovate has a free hosted version for GitHub.

While it may be "fully open source," watch out for its license:

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/blob/main/license

> Renovate versions 12.0.0 (released 2018-04-09) and onwards are released under the GNU Affero General Public License.

The dependabot-gitlab project mentioned above is MIT, for comparison

Disclosure: Renovate author

Renovate is indeed AGPL, but if you're just running it as a CLI, do you think there's anything to "watch out for"? It does not make any project you run it against AGPL, that's for sure.

Also you should be aware that dependabot-core, which dependabot-gitlab wraps, is not technically Open Source at all: https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/blob/main/LICE... Wrapping a non-open source project in another project which claims to be MIT licensed does not change the underlying license. I'm not a lawyer but question the validity of them doing this without larger disclaimers.

However, I think that it's likely not something to "watch out for" either. Likely both licensing approaches were intended as a way to forbid or discourage competing services and each project welcomes people self-hosting.

In short I don't think that the license of Renovate or Dependabot is likely material for anyone planning to run it for themselves.

Thanks for weighing in, and for drawing attention to the wrapped nature of dependabot-gitlab -- I didn't drill down into their implementation

As for the "watch out," I apologize if that came across as scolding or whatever, but in my company, and likely quite a few others, AGPL software is forbidden. Thus, maybe I have said "be aware" instead of "watch out," so I'll try to choose more neutral advisory language next time

Your "but it's just a CLI" is the nuance of the AGPL that I don't want to pay lawyers to disambiguate since this very thread was about running a GitLab bot, over the network, or in CI which is hosted on runners that connect over the network

Maybe I just need to stay out of these threads and let people do their own license homework, but I certainly do get value when someone else makes me aware so I can dismiss the tooling. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess

What do you mean by "the included dependency checks"?

If you're referring to Renovate, there's no such paid option.

If you're referring to GitLab paid features, I'm not sure how that's any different between tools.

But still no way to opt-out from GitHub Copilot when using public repositories? I would have expected private profiles to give that option.

If you don't want people training models on your code then do not make it public.

You can make code public and still legally restrict its use (see: GPL).

GPL doesn’t restrict you from using it as input to a model. It’s just that as the model is a derivative work, it also has to be released under the GPL.

I know this is the main question, but is it a derivative work? Does all the code I write need to be under the GPL because I once read some GPL code and learned from it?

Or does copilot not work like other ML projects and actually copies sections of code?

FWIW GPL was an example, I honestly don’t know whether it applies to the particular case.

Yeah, that'll work lol

I got reached out multiple times and got hired twice based on my public repos and contributions. While I’d like to enable this option for privacy purposes, seems that the only way I’d use this if my employer requires me to do so.

Hmm, I wonder if there is a way to turn off some of those things but not others.

This is what I would like too. I want my repos to be public, but my contribution activity to be hidden.

Making the profile private doesn't hide your public repositories.

GitHub is now owned by Microsoft. Just saying.

GitHub was just as bad before Microsoft bought them; a proprietary software as a service vendor using venture capital funding to provide a loss leader that lured people away from running and using open source infrastructure.

https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

Link for settings:

https://github.com/settings/profile

``` Contributions & Activity

Make profile private and hide activity

Enabling this will hide your contributions and activity from your GitHub profile and from social features like followers, stars, feeds, leaderboards and releases.

Include private contributions on my profile

Your contribution graph, achievements, and activity overview will show your private contributions without revealing any repository or organization information. Read more. ```

It's always been available, although tricky: click "report abuse" on your account, write something, and voila - you have a working account, invisible to others: they see your profile and activity page as 404.

What do they mean by “now generally available”? AFAIK, private profiles were available before also.

Yeah, was this in an open beta before? I have been using it for my work account for a while.

Yup, introduced as a beta feature in April, now it's here to stay.

From https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-21-private-profiles/)

> Private profiles are in public beta

Just in time for Netlify to discontinue support for private GitHub repositories for free plans.

Good thing cloudflare still has free Cloudflare pages support for private GitHub pages.

Do you have a link to where they've said that, that really sucks, I've had a much smoother experience setting up pages with Netlify than Cloudflare.

I scanned the last couple months of their blog posts and could not find anything to support that claim. The docs or pricing page don’t seem to indicate anything like that either.

The only related thing I found was that free accounts are limited to one user that can trigger deploys in private repos, while anyone can trigger deploys in public repos (assuming I understood the announcement correctly).

Most people got confused with the wording in their recent policy change for the free plan.

They recently changed the policy for Organization-owned repos. The continuous deployment for organization-owned private repos is no longer allowed in the free plan.

But personal account's public and private repos are still part of the free plan.

Ah that makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

Netlify shouldn't be trusted anyway, I've seen them randomly terminate an account and take all the associated sites down.

In terms of features, CloudFlard Pages wiped the floor with the competition, nobody is even close.

Unless you care about centralization, then you might still use GitHub Pages or Vercel.

Maybe I'm deviating from the general consensus here, but to me the social-network-isms in GitHub are an anti-pattern in business and undesired in such a highly useful utility service.

The discovery features resemble "social network-isms" but have a lot of utility. Also, GitHub is obviously not only about business, and the symbiosis of what it offers for businesses as well as open source users is important to its identity in my opinion.

That all having been said, I do not disagree that in most cases, the "social coding" thing is a misnomer. GitHub's main contribution, in my opinion, was actually just putting source control and source code at the forefront of the project forge concept. Sourceforge felt like a nice website for projects to organize, but code storage felt at best like an afterthought. GitHub's forks and pull requests are what really make it shine, and the rest is mostly either bonus or noise.

Eh, public stars and forks on OSS repos is a really valuable indicator of whether to seriously consider using a library IMO.

Not like, 3k vs 8k, but like 200 vs 0... help me understand if this is this a hobby project someone wrote and abandoned in a few days.

I have projects lovingly maintained for a decade (and responding to genuine issues with bug fixes within days) that have under five stars. Not a good metric.

I still strongly suspect that you have more stars than any "competitive" OSS projects in the niche (if any even exist), which is all I'm using the stars as a heuristic for (initial sort).

> if any even exist

Fair point.

Do you have an actual complaint here, or just buzzwords? Calling something an “anti-pattern” or “undesired” doesn’t mean anything.

Your comment contains no substance that couldn’t have been conveyed by saying “I hate it”. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. That’s what I do. Is there an actual reason that the mere existence of social networking features is harmful to those of us who choose not to bother with them?

They may become mandatory signals used for finding jobs? Thin line of thought maybe, but I honestly don’t mind the features I’m just trying to give a talking point to rally around.

It's infuriating that people don't make themselves easily reachable on GitHub.

So many people with so much talent, wasting it on some really meaningless stuff.

What's "meaningless stuff" to you in this context?

Widespread practices infect norms.

For example, thanks to the norms fostered on GitHub, you can no longer expect the average programmer to file good bug reports or to just interact in an appropriate way with the bugtracker.

We can't really talk about "wikis", either, without confusion about what a wiki even is—again, thanks to GitHub.

> For example, thanks to the norms fostered on GitHub, you can no longer expect the average programmer to file good bug reports or to just interact in an appropriate way with the bugtracker.

Was it done properly? I suspect that average programmer just didn't report anything, instead of create new GitHub issue. It's annoying to sign up each ML or bugzilla.

How can GitHub be at fault for people being lazy or lacking common sense when filing a bug report, or being rude?

> the social-network-isms in GitHub are an anti-pattern

I don't know, as the "social coding" platform never claimed to be anything different.

Don't worry you'll be vilified for disliking features by the tech community because they can't not have social features everywhere.

What differentiates Github from any other git provider, except for the social network-isms?

Aren't private profiles in the opposite direction of social network-isms?

But the kids, they like it.

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